A real case for the fall of Google Search

During last NorthSec 2024 CTF in Montreal, Canada, I made a hardware challenge where the participants got hinted about comments that you can find in the documentation of a very specific library named CryptoAuthLib. That library was for a even more specific piece of cryptographic hardware, which has some versions under NDA.

Essentially, the need was to be able to grep the interwebs and simply find that documentation. This is something I would expect from a search engine from the 90s like Altavista or Lycos.fr.

One of the search strings with the quotes parts of it to get the exact phrase was: “initialize TempKey to a specified value”.

To my dismay, I saw someone browser showing the following on Google:

But then when using DuckDuckGo:

For whatever reason, Google got it delisted from its index, or doesn’t want to show it. I’ve tried with another person and browser to make sure the behavior was the same, and yes it was.

To add insult to the injury, even Bing gave out what was needed:

I mean…

At this point, it doesn’t matter to me what justifications anyone could have about this. Adding this to other anecdotes from my own personal search history, I now have a strong case to loose trust in something that enabled me to quickly know and do great things so well in the past 25 years.

Perhaps the immediate answer is to switch to DuckDuckGo, and the medium/long term one would be some sort of LLM/AI that shows their sources (like Perplexity) or maybe I should just download the Internet and grep locally.

Feel free to test on your own and leave comments.